How To

The payTabs and Decoder are seperate applets. Typically the payTabs applet would encode credit card numbers on your web site and then the Decoder would be used on your home or business computer to decode the numbers, copied and pasted from the emailed order.

How to Test

1. Enter a fictitious number in the payTabs applet.

2. Click the ENCODE button.

3. Copy & Paste. Copy encoded number from text fields on the right of the payTabs applet and paste them into the Decoder applet, one at a time. NO TRAILING SPACES. The Magic Decoder will not work if there is a space after the copied number.

4. Click the decode button on the Magic Decoder applet.

The beauty of Java for an application like this is that your customer's credit card or check number is never sent over the Internet. The Java applet is a short, quick program that's downloaded with the web page to your customer's computer. Once there, a copy of the applet runs on their computer and encodes the number. The encoded number is beamed back through the telephone lines to your server where it is stored as email for your later retrieval.

The payTabs applet can be included with the tally or checkout page of your store. The checkout page emails the order to you. The Decoder is installed on your home or business computer where you can 'copy' the encoded number from your email and paste it into the decoder. Press decode and the decoder will display the original number entered by the customer. Your customer's credit card or check number never has to be stored on the Internet.

The encryption used is not phenomenal by any means. We just add, subtract, multiply, divide over and over again, add a couple of fancy parenthesis unions (algebra) now and again, as much as we want, in the payTabs applet, and then the reverse formula is used in the decoder applet. The idea is just to encrypt the number so that if someone views your email they won't see a credit card number. An encryption specialist, in all likelihood, could probably devise a program that would decode it; something like in the movie War Games where the big computer just keeps turning numbers over until it cracks the code, except in this case we can extend our formula to as many numbers as needed and use modern coding methods where the formula is hidden in several parts of this and other programs. Deciphering is not an easy job any more, but who's to say. There are no absolutes, but encryption is getting very sophisticated.

It's silly but you might have noticed we use different formulas in the demo above. The encrypted number in the payTab image is different from that shown encoded on the right. That's because showing the actual encrypted number would be an unnecessary clue. Not displaying the encrypted number is added protection.

The added benefit of the 'display image' on the payTabs module is security. Generally people distrust transactions over the Internet. In a very short time the publics opinion will sway in the other direction as more and more encryption methods are put into practice and gain familiarity. People will rely on online transactions more than any other. Until then we have to take measures to communicate the effectiveness of security methods we use. The 'dirty little secret' of the Internet right now is that over 90% of all online transactions are still done manually; that is someone still copies the credit card or check number by hand onto a deposit slip. We believe the payTabs module with its added security measures supports this practice.